Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Here We Are Again ...

Nursing home staff slapped and punched pensioners in their care because they wanted to get their work done as quickly as possible. Zonke Nzimande, 35, and Wimon Hill, 29, treated elderly residents of Cornelia Lodge Nursing Home in Southsea, Hampshire, as if they were on a cattle farm, Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court was told.

Mqobile Mavuso, a carer at the home, said that in September, 2006, she saw Nzimande punch an 80-year-old man and slap three elderly women, one of whom was 93. Another carer, Sandra Joseph, said that she witnessed Hill dragging a blind woman of 90 from her chair and “frog-marching” her to the toilet.

I posted ages ago on the discrepancy between our rulers atttitudes to police and NHS recruitment. It's a Bad Thing for an ethnic minority population to be policed by people of a different race or culture, but a Good Thing, to be celebrated, for the natives to be nursed and doctored by people of a different race or culture.

The elderly population of this country are predominantly natives. I'm not sure why it's any less important to have people of your own culture nurse you when you're frail or dying than it is to have people of your own culture arrest you when you're young and fit.

I know its unlikely that the care homes are NHS-run, but I think the principle still applies. Minorities will be over-represented as carers, as they are as nurses. Six months ago I noted the revelations from the Craegmoor Nursing Home in Islington :

A care home boss whose staff goaded disabled patients into attacking each other was warned she faces jail yesterday. Diane Butler, 47, was in charge of carers who hurled racist and cruel taunts at defenceless residents with physical and mental difficulties.

A year-long reign of terror included one disabled woman being urged to kick and beat a Down’s Syndrome sufferer. Margaret Burdfield, 49, was also called a ‘white bitch’ and ‘ugly bitch’ at Craegmoor Residential Care Home, North London.

The three abusive staff were shopped to police by carer Basil Hanson who secretly filmed their taunts on a mobile phone.

To know whether such attacks are occurring disproportionately you'd have to know the distribution of staff/patient ethnicities in English care homes, as well as the number of such inter-racial assaults compared to intra-racial ones. I somehow doubt that such research will get Home Office funding. But I argued in my previous posts that white self-loathing may be playing a part in fuelling non-white racism.

It's an article of faith on the political Left that saying bad things about asylum-seekers or immigrants will lead to racist attacks and murders. Yet the corollary to this theorem, that saying bad things about the natives will lead to attacks on them, is never put forward, despite the fact that saying bad things about the natives is more common, perfectly socially acceptable and actually state-sponsored.